How to track what goes viral on social media

When it comes to social media marketing, one of the main goals a marketer has is to make his client’s content go viral. Companies dedicate a lot of time and effort into producing content that’s funny, engaging and quirky to make it more likely to be shared and distributed among followers and social media users. But how exactly do you track how far your content goes?

Recently, Twitter and Pinterest launched updated analytics features that have helped marketers be more precise about content that gets shared. One feature that would’ve benefited these platforms is the ability to see if the content went viral and how far it travelled on these social platforms.

Google+ Ripples

Nearly two years ago, Google+ added a feature called “Ripples” to their social media analytics. Ripples is a visual graph that shows the way that your post was publicly shared and distributed on Google+ (you can see this graph by clicking on the upper right hand corner of the post).

A great advantage of Google+ Ripples is that you can see how shares are connected to each other and the relationship between different users as well as the content that these users share.

In our opinion, Twitter and Pinterest needs to create exactly the same thing. This type of data can be even more valuable for Twitter seeing as the entire site is based on retweets, and favourites.

What to use in the meantime

As you may or may not know, WSI regularly live blogs and tweets at conferences and workshops. When we live tweet, we create a hashtag for the conference so that attendees and speakers can create their own stream on Twitter. At the end of the day, we create a Tweet Reach report so that we can see who retweeted our tweets and how many impressions the hashtag made on Twitter.

Need help with your social mediastrategy or reporting? Contact WSI OMS today.